If the freedom of speech is taken away then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.

- George Washington

Friday, 17 December 2010

The Problem With Lefties

I know it's appalling blogiquette to quote slabs of someone else's words without making any effort at adding something of your own, but this comment (on Andrew Gilligan's blog in the Telegraph) is so succinct, and so bang on the money, that I thought more people ought to see it. It encapsulates my thoughts very well. Gilligan asked (subsequently edited):

What else are we to make of the demand by Women Against Rape, no less, that the rape allegations against Mr Assange must not be investigated and the great hero immediately freed?

One response:

This happens because the Left has prejudices rather than principles.

Lefties favour groups or not according to where they stand in its internal heirarchy. So its most favoured clients are blacks, Muslims, gays, whales, criminals, polar bears, gypsies, Marxist terrorists, and so on; and its most hated groups are Americans, white middle class males, Christians, married parents, members of the British armed forces, white farmers, and so on.

This works up to a point. A lefty never has a problem deciding whom to side with in a dispute between a black criminal and the police, or gays and Christians, or Marxist terrorists and white farmers (whether in 1930s Russia or noughties Zimbabwe). Their prejudices instruct them unerringly.

Where it gets a bit dodgy is when there's a showdown between client groups that are both at the top of the favour list. So the left goes into a HAL9000-esque paranoid fugue when Muslim clerics advocate beating up women, or when black reggae singers urge that homosexuals be shot in the head. The left has literally no idea what to do because in theory both sides should be equally immune from criticism. It does not compute.

Here we have the latest instance of this determined non-thinking. Assange correctly hates Americans but may be a rapist, so leftist agitprop outfits like Women Against Rape have to decide which cause is more important: opposing rape versus hating America. It looks like hating America has won. This tells you that WAR is not about rape at all but about using whatever stick is handy to beat people they hate. Accusing all men of being rapists was a great way of dehumanising them so they could be stripped of their rights and property, which is the real cause. Women being raped? Who cares.

The Left looks stupid on these occasions not because it's stupid but because it is vicious, nasty, envious, hypocritical, morally incompetent and thoroughly spiteful.